April 2004: Week Two: Page Three: This Far and No Further

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April 12: A Nation correspondant reports on the horror that is Fallujah. The reporter, Dahr Jamail, enters the city during what is supposed to be a cease-fire; the reality is much different. (Jamail goes in with a bus full of medical supplies; the plan is to drop off the supplies and carry out as many wounded civilians as possible.) The road between Baghdad and Fallujah is strewn with wrecked and burning vehicles, including Iraqi automobiles, US Humvees, APCs, fuel tankers, and tanks. The city is virtually deserted except for hundreds of insurgents armed with Kalashnikov rifles and RPGs. The US Marines occupy the northeastern quarter of the city, and squads of Sunni and Shi'ite fighters occupy the rest. The only hospital in Fallujah stands empty after being bombed by US artillery. Wounded civilians lay about the streets alongside corpses. The entire city is staffed only by two small, overworked clinics. Jamail and his colleagues make several runs into the "no-man's land" between US and Iraqi forces to retrieve wounded; their last trip is marred by US sniper fire that blows out their taillights. Jamail writes, "My friends were forced to retreat, leaving a pregnant woman trapped in her house." In the morning, Jamail and his colleagues load up their bus with wounded, having been warned to leave because the US is going to begin "clearing the city" with aerial bombings. He concludes, "We left the city as part of a long convoy of civilian vehicles loaded with families. On the way, we passed groups of mujahedeen at their posts, among them defiant armed boys as young as 11. Coming from the opposite direction were US military vehicles, leaving huge dust plumes behind them. The new troops seemed to be taking up positions on the outskirts of town. We passed several more smoking shells of vehicles destroyed by the resistance -- more fuel tankers, more blasted APCs. We are now in Baghdad, afraid to walk the streets. The Mahdi Army is rumored to be hunting down journalists. The NGOs [non-governmental organizations associated with the United Nations, mostly on humanitarian missions] are pulling out. Everyone knows the 'cease-fire' was a lie. If this is a truce, what does war look like?" (The Nation)
April 12: Adnan Pachachi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council and the former foreign minister of Iraq, who is so close to the Bush administration that he escorted Laura Bush to the State of the Union address three months ago, condemns the US offensive in Fallujah. In an address broadcast on al-Arabiya satellite TV, Pachachi says, "It is not right to punish all the people of Falluja, and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal." Pachachi's remarks echo Arab criticisms of Israel's repression of Palestinians. (Sydney Morning Herald)
April 12: Over $27 million in "suspicious" transactions to Islamic charities thought to support terrorism, as well as to Islamic clerics and students suspected of terrorist ties, have been traced from the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington DC, according to a federal investigation. These monies include large wire transfers overseas by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the US and a close friend of the Bush family. The Riggs Bank. used for years by the embassy, has dropped the Saudi embassy as a client as a result of the investigation. The Bush White House is closely monitoring the investigation; the 9/11 commission has also been briefed on the results of the investigation. A Saudi spokesman strongly denies that any embassy funds were used to support terrorism and said Bandar chose to pull the embassy's accounts out of Riggs. The Saudis point out that an earlier FBI probe into embassy funds that were moved to alleged associates of the 9/11 hijackers has not led to any charges. US officials stress that they have identified no evidence of any knowing Saudi aid to terrorist groups, but they express frustration at their inability to penetrate a number of large and seemingly irregular transactions. "There's a lot of money moving in a lot of directions—maybe not all that carefully," says one senior law-enforcement official. "Everyone wants to get to the bottom of it."
Among the payments that have drawn scrutiny, documents show, were $19,200 in checks between December 2000 and January 2003 from the Saudi Embassy to an Islamic cleric, Gulshair Muhammad al-Shukrijumah. The Florida-based imam has been on the FBI's radar screen for some time: he once testified on behalf of convicted terrorist Clement Hampton-El. The imam's son, Adnan al-Shukrijumah, also known as "Jafar the Pilot," is a suspected al-Qaeda operative who is the subject of a worldwide FBI manhunt. A Saudi spokesman said Gulshair al-Shukrijumah was a Saudi-funded "missionary" whose payments were terminated last year. Another area of FBI inquiry involves $70,000 in wire transfers on July 10, 2001, to two Saudis in Massachusetts. One of the Saudis wrote a $20,000 check that same day to a third Saudi who had listed the same address as Aafia Siddiqui, a microbiologist who is believed to have been a US operative for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. A Saudi spokesman said the wire transfers had no connection to Siddiqui and were used to pay educational and medical expenses for Saudi families in the United States. But bureau officials say the matter remains under active investigation; a government document shows the bulk of the funds were wired to an account in Saudi Arabia. Some reports may prove personally embarrassing to Bandar. One involves $17.4 million in wire transfers last year from the Saudi Defense Ministry account to a man in Saudi Arabia identified as the coordinator of "home improvements/construction" for Prince Bandar. The funds were to build a new palace for the prince. Ali Ahmed, a prominent Saudi dissident, noted that Bandar already owns at least seven palaces and mansions around the world. "This is corruption beyond the pale," he says. But Saudi Embassy lawyer Nancy Dutton says that government and private accounts are frequently intertwined by Saudi royals. "Just because it went through a government account doesn't mean it's not his personal money," she says. (MSNBC)
April 12: Buzzflash interviews John Dean, the former counsel to Richard Nixon during the Watergate years. Dean has just published a book entitled Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, where he compares the Bush administration's obsession with secrecy and deception to the Nixon administration, and says that the only thing keeping this administration safe from mass impeachments is that it keeps its darkest secrets hidden from public view. "To say that their secret presidency is undemocratic is an understatement," Dean writes. Buzzflash writes, "Dean's book makes you realize that the Bush Cartel is going to do everything they can to steal the 2004 election. Because if they lose, they might end up in a federal prison, if they don't pardon themselves before they are indicted. The White House doesn't have enough shredders to cover up their likely crimes." Dean says that, in the process of writing the book, he went from warning about the abuses of power to actually creating a list and writing a book that chronicles abuses of power because there were too many to keep up with. "[W]hat happened in the process of writing the book is that I couldn't get out in front of the abuses of power that I was witnessing," Dean says. "Therefore, what became warnings quickly were transformed into indictments. So I found myself preparing a Bill of Particulars, because it became quickly apparent, particularly in the area that I was focusing on, which was the repressive if not obsessive secrecy -- that it was policy. They knew exactly what they were doing. They wouldn't want to hear or entertain any warnings or alerts from anybody who might see what they're doing as not the wisest course to take."
He continues, "[A]s somebody who has been inside as counsel, what I see is a White House that has got some very serious problems. How do I know that? How, given the fact that there are no investigations actively going on by independent bodies? Well, I know it because one can connect the dots. There are patterns that become very clear when you start sifting through what we do know, and putting it together with what we don't know. Circumstantial cases are often stronger than direct evidence, and I think there's certainly an overwhelming circumstantial case as to the obsessive secrecy of this presidency. As to the events and the activities that are being undertaken in secret, we're just getting glimpses. And as I watched the figures move in the shadows, I've got a pretty good idea what they're doing. Can I say so with certainty? In some instances yes, but others, no. But I can tell you that everybody should be watching this very carefully because it's deeply troubling." In explaining his title, he says, "I realized that it worked in more ways than I had anticipated -– that, yes, some of the underlying activity, I think, is far more egregious than Watergate. Certainly the secrecy I was running into and plowing through was far worse than anything I had experienced within the Nixon White House. In the Bush White House, it's become a policy and the whole approach to government to do everything in secret. In the Bush White House, I found the same kind of political mentality that drove the Nixon White House, where every decision was made for its political consequence and potential of reelection, rather than any substantive merit, driving all the decision making. I sort of slowly unwind this piece by piece, and show what I believe are circumstances that are worse than Watergate."
Comparing the Watergate-era "stonewalling" by the Nixon White House to the practices of the current administration, Dean says, "In the Nixon administration, the stonewalling really didn't start in earnest until Watergate was fairly far along, and when it was starting to threaten the White House. With the Bush administration, it really started in the 2000 campaign. Bush and Cheney were able to successfully stonewall their way through the 2000 campaign. I offer several important examples. The press never pushed them, never pressed them for the information. And they got away with it. And then they took their stonewalling from their campaign, and it morphed into continued stonewalling right in the White House, which is the reason I pick examples with the campaign and track them right into the White House. Let me give you a 'for example.' Cheney's health came up very early, right after he was selected by Bush. He has stonewalled and refused to supply any kind of relevant medical data where any outside physician could examine that data and tell us how healthy or sick this man really is. Obviously I suspect there's a reason for that, more than his privacy. If Dick Cheney were running a committee to select the Vice President, given his health, he's the last guy he would select. It is just too tenuous. You've to also remember, as I point out in the book, that Cheney had a quadruple bypass. They have about a 20-year life expectancy, until they really are questioned as to how much longer the bypass will be effective. Cheney's 20 years runs out in the middle of the 2004 campaign."
Dean doesn't believe that Bush and Cheney are the evil wannabe dictators they are sometimes portrayed as by some liberals: "Everything I've been able to discern about Cheney and Bush is that they're well meaning. They believe that they are serving the greater good. It happens to be the greater good that relates primary and principally to Republican contributors. It's a 'what's good for their contributors is good for America' kind of attitude. But I don't find them to be evil men. I find them to be zealous men who can't hear anybody other than themselves. I think they have been caught up by the power of their offices, and I find their attitude toward government very disquieting. They've learned nothing from the mistakes that their predecessors have made, and rather have decided to see if they can't make all those mistakes on their own."
However, Dean notes that the administration is extremely vindictive, particularly in the Valerie Plame Wilson case: "As I say in the book, it's probably the dirtiest political trick I've ever seen. Nixon at his worst never put out 'a hit' on anybody. And Nixon at his worst never went after one of his enemies' wives or husbands, if it happened to be a female. What's striking to me about the way this administration plays it is not only are they vicious with their perceived enemies, they literally eat their own when they do something they don't like. Take Paul O'Neill. They, in essence, tried to eviscerate the man for being truthful about what he'd seen in the Bush White House. It was obviously something they didn't want to get out -– that the president was scripted, that the president really couldn't ask an intelligent question of as his treasury secretary says; O'Neill also reported that they were planning to do something with Iraq from virtually the day they walked in the White House. They really went after O'Neill, and O'Neill is not a political fighter at this stage of his life, so he just sort disappeared. You've got the same situation in a sense now of another insider, Richard Clarke. They're going after him tooth and nail. He really had been there for a long time as a pure professional, but he was one of theirs. And now because he's explained what really happened, they're trying to do everything they can to destroy the man. It's really rather sad and pathetic, but it's the way they play it."
Buzzflash observes, "But they do have a way of shutting people up," and Dean responds, "They eliminate them. They try to make examples out of these people. There's the one case I cite in the book where they literally took a rather low-level drug agent -– an intelligent agent –- and threatened to send him to jail for life for leaking. It's pretty tough stuff. And when they're doing this, they're sending messages to others that you've got to toe the secrecy line. They want to have that White House practically in shrink wrap. When they see a leak, if they can spot it and identify it, they're pretty vicious." When asked, "What sort of dangers does that pose to the republic when you have people governing who think, in essence, the law doesn't apply to them?" Dean replies, "It's terribly troubling. I happen to believe that until we get back to divided government, meaning one or more of the houses of Congress is not that of the president, then we're playing with very dangerous circumstances in an era of terrorism. I shudder at the thought of what could happen in this country if there's another and even more violent terror attack, where Bush and Cheney are at the helm, and would try to manipulate the next event the way they are continuing to manipulate 9/11. It's a very frightening prospect. This is one of the most serious issues I address in the book. There has been no effort by the president to reduce the 'terror' in terrorism, and to the contrary they want to govern by fear for it is easier. It is also undemocratic." (Buzzflash)
April 12: Veteran foreign journalist Naomi Klein says that the resistance in Iraq is more of a native "intifada" than an opposition of, in Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's words, a few "thugs, gangs and terrorists." Klein writes, "This is dangerous wishful thinking. The war against the occupation is now being fought out in the open, by regular people defending their homes and neighborhoods -- an Iraqi intifada." Why are ordinary Iraqis picking up guns and planting homemade bombs? "They stole our playground," an eight-year-old boy in Sadr City says, pointing at six tanks parked in a soccer field, next to a rusty jungle gym. The field is a precious bit of green in an area of Baghdad that is otherwise a swamp of raw sewage and uncollected rubbish. Little if any of the billions of reconstruction dollars have been spent in Sadr City, one reason why the area is so supportive of Moqtada al-Sadr's "Mahdi Army." The "Army" wasn't always opposed to US troops -- before Paul Bremer provoked Sadr into an armed conflict by shutting down his newspaper and arresting and killing his deputies, the Mahdi army was not fighting coalition forces, it was doing their job for them. Bremer's CPA has yet to provide the most elemental security for civilians in Sadr City. The traffic lights don't work. Fresh water is still at a premium. Electrical service is spotty at best. So, as Klein observes, "in Sadr City, Sadr's so-called 'outlaw militia' can be seen engaged in such subversive activities as directing traffic and guarding factories from looters. In a way, the Mahdi army is as much Bremer's creation as it Sadr's: it was Bremer who created Iraq's security vacuum -- Sadr simply filled it."
But now as the June 30 handover approaches, Bremer sees Sadr's militia as a threat, along with the communities that have grown to depend on them. There are far worse things than overrun playgrounds in Sadr City, however. The hospitals are filled with Iraqis like Raad Daier, an ambulance driver with a bullet in his stomach. He was shot while carrying six civilians injured by US soldiers, including a pregnant woman who was shot in the stomach. Her child died before being born. Burned-out cars struck by US missiles line the streets; local hospitals confirm that many of their drivers were roasted alive. Block 37 of Sadr City's Chuadir district is a row of houses where every door was riddled with holes. Residents said US tanks rolled down their street firing into their homes. Five people were killed, including Murtada Muhammad, aged four. In Sadr's headquarters, reduced to rubble by US tanks and guided missiles, a Koran lies bullet-riddled in the floor. Clerics at Sadr's offices tell anguished tales of soldiers storming in and shredding pictures of Grand Ayatollan Ali al-Sistani, the top Shia cleric in Iraq. The floor is covered in torn religious texts, including several copies of the Koran that been ripped and shot through with bullets. The local Shi'ites know that hours before, US forces bombed a Sunni mosque in Fallujah. Far from the Sunnis and Shi'ites warring on one another, they, at least for now, are unifying against a common enemy. Klein writes, "You could see it at the mosques in Sadr City on Thursday: thousands of Shias lined up to donate blood, destined for Sunnis hurt in the attacks in Falluja. 'We should thank Paul Bremer," Salih Ali told me. 'He has finally united Iraq. Against him.' An elderly shopkeeper tells an Australian reporter about how last year his family's hopes were high after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but now they fear that things would just get worse. The son of a Shi'ite father and a Sunni mother, he tells of his two brothers who Hussein had executed as political prisoners, and then says, "The invasion was a bad idea. Saddam was bad and Bush is bad -- but we'd have Saddam back any day." (Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald)
April 12: Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean writes a column for the New York Times praising Ralph Nader, but asking Democratic voters not to vote for Nader in November. He writes, "Everyone expects this year's presidential election to be decided by razor-thin margins in a few battleground states. Everyone also expects the candidacy of Ralph Nader to make the race between John Kerry and George Bush even closer. As I know from experience, however, voters have a way of proving everyone wrong. Democrats are motivated to defeat the president this year. They've seen firsthand what three years of Bush administration policies have done to America. And they want to stop his policies from inflicting any more damage on working-class Americans, the environment, our international standing or a woman's right to choose. Many Democrats also admire Ralph Nader's achievements, as I do. But if they truly want George Bush out of the White House, they won't vote for Ralph Nader in November. Ralph Nader has built a remarkable legacy as a consumer advocate. Because of his tireless work, we have federal consumer protection laws and a federal department dedicated to the protection of our environment, and millions of defective motor vehicles are off the roads. And I campaigned against the very same corporate special interests that he has been criticizing longer than almost anyone else. But I don't believe that the best way to do justice to Ralph Nader's legacy is to vote for him for president. Re-electing George Bush would undo everything Ralph Nader has worked for through his entire career and, in fact, could lead to the dismantling of many of his accomplishments. Voting for Ralph Nader, or for any third-party candidate for president, means a vote for a candidate who has no realistic shot of winning the White House. To underscore the danger of voting for any third-party candidate in elections this close, a statistic from the 2000 campaign may prove useful: a total of eight third-party candidates won more votes than the difference between Al Gore and George Bush nationwide. When I ended my bid for the presidency, I asked my supporters to continue our quest for change in America. Our group, Democracy for America, is committed to exposing the ways in which the Bush administration's policies are designed to prop up the privileged and please right-wing ideologues. Our agenda is rooted in hope and real American values -- opportunity, integrity, honesty. This is the way to defeat George Bush. Ralph Nader once said that your best teacher is your last mistake. Too many of us learned the consequences of not standing together four years ago. This November, we can elect a president who fights for average Americans. But we can achieve this goal only if we join together -- and don't repeat our last mistake." (New York Times/Truthout)
April 12: Moderate media commentator Mark Shields writes an unusually irate column calling for the Bush administration to apologize for its compendium of lies surrounding the reasoning behind the Iraqi invasion. He begins by recalling the attacks on former presidential candidate Howard Dean when Dean asked if the capture of Saddam Hussein had actually made America a safer place. Wall Street Journal opinion columnist James Taranto blasted Dean at the time: "It's not easy to cram so much idiocy, mendacity and arrogance into nine words. ...Dean's assertion is impossible to support rationally." Now, as Hussein resides in custody and US troops are coming home in body bags in ever-increasing numbers, it's hard to rationally defend Taranto's questioning of Dean. Indeed, Hussein's capture did nothing to make Americans safer. Shields writes, "Do you think any one of the 40,000 or so foreign policy-national security gurus who ridiculed and condemned Howard Dean, last December, has for so much as a microsecond thought about apologizing or had even a flash of self-doubt?" Shields continues with a questioning of the rationale behind the war: "Americans were urged and encouraged by the nation's leaders to make the most serious of all judgments -- the awesome decision to go to war -- because of the weapons of mass destruction the despot controlled and would not hesitate to use against the United States. None of that was true. But because Saddam Hussein is out of power, the United States' pre-emptive war against Iraq -- which continues to cost a billion dollars a month, the loss of friends and trust around the globe, the enmity of millions, and more young widows and orphans -- becomes somehow retroactively the 'right' thing."
Shields goes on to address the topic of just how US troops are sent to Iraq: "The lies continue. President George W. Bush boasts of the nation's all-volunteer armed forces: 'We have seen the great advantages of a military in which all serve by their own decision.' The truth is that as of last month, no fewer than 44,500 American soldiers who had fulfilled their contractual obligations, completed their enlistments and made plans to return to civilian life or retirement were frozen -- by an arbitrary 'stop-loss' order -- on active duty. A survey by the military's Mental Health Advisory Team found the suicide rate among GI's stationed in Iraq to be 35 percent higher than among Army troops wordwide. We do not have an all-volunteer service today. The reality is that we now have a limited military draft. But the only Americans who are subjected to the current 'draft' are those who have already demonstrated their patriotism by volunteering to serve in the military and have then served honorably. There is a class difference, too, in proudly classless America. All the sacrifice of this war is being borne by the minority of our population who overwhelmingly do not go onto college. While nearly 50 percent of the US adult population has some college, barely six percent of our military recruits have any college. One of the 'advantages' of the all-volunteer military the president chooses not to mention is that under the draft, which was in effect until 1973, fewer than 10 percent of the draftees failed to complete their obligation. In the vaunted all-volunteer military, more than one out of three of today's soldiers fails to complete his initial enlistment. Among white male recruits, the failure to complete their enlistment rate is 35 percent, and among white female recruits, it is 55 percent. The official duplicity and deception that characterized American policy in Vietnam must have taught us all that the credibility of every American leader is fragile and perishable. The leader who misleads his countrymen reaps the whirlwind. The leader's punishment is the mistrust of his fellow citizens. Mistrust is the father of cynicism, and cynicism breeds alienation -- which will wound the nation more profoundly than Saddam Hussein in or out of custody." (CNN)
April 12: A Buzzflash contributor asks the simple question, "If Russia had invaded Iraq last year against the advice of the US, and everything that has happened to the US soldiers had happened to Russian soldiers, I wonder if the US would be as angry with the insurgent Iraqis as we are now?" She continues, "Would we even call them 'insurgents' or would we call them 'Iraqi defenders?' Would the word at the US water coolers be anti Iraqis or anti Russians? Would we hear rumbles that the US should go into Iraq to help the invaded Iraqis? Would we feel sympathy for the Iraqis as the Russian soldiers tore down the doors of Iraqi homes and forced the families out on the street? When tragic events happened in Iraq would we be supportive of the Russians or would we say that they should have seen it coming? If, during all this death and war, we discovered that Putin had lied to his people in order to receive their support for the Iraq invasion, what would we say? Would we say that Putin should be jailed for his deceit? Would we say that he was justified if he lied to his people because Saddam was a corrupt leader? Would we support American troops being sent to Iraq to help the Russians after the Russians discovered they had bitten off more with this war than they could chew? What if Bush appeared on TV and said, 'Even though we all know Russia did not plan well enough before declaring war on Iraq, and even if Russia went to war based on lies, I think I should send US men and women into this war to aid the Russians. The Russians have created a disaster in Iraq so I think some of our troops must go and die in order to bring some help to the Russian soldiers.' What percentage of Americans would support the war then? How much support would Bush get? Would Americans be more prone to aid the Iraqis or the Russians?" (Buzzflash)

April 13: About 40 foreign hostages from 12 countries are being held by Iraqi insurgents, and the FBI is investigating the abductions. Dan Senor, a spokesman for the US-led administration, says it would not negotiate with "terrorists or kidnappers" to gain the hostages' release. He will not comment on efforts to free the captives. "The FBI is working with coalition forces and Iraqi security forces to seek out the hostage-takers and the hostages," Senor says. "We have a number of other law enforcement agencies from the international community who are working on this." The French Foreign Ministry confirms that a French television journalist has been taken hostage. Alexandre Jordanov, a journalist who works for Capa Television in Paris, disappeared on April 11. Franck Duprat, a videotape editor who worked with Jordanov on an investigative television show called "The Real News," says Jordanov disappeared on the road between Baghdad and Karbala. The kidnapping came just hours after France urged its citizens Tuesday to leave Iraq. There are fewer than 100 French citizens in Iraq, mostly journalists, aid workers and the employees of private companies. Nearly all are in Baghdad. Four Italians working as private security guards for a US company in Iraq are reported missing, and an Arab satellite TV broadcaster said they were kidnapped. Seven civilian employees of a subsidiary of the Halliburton Co., an American firm, are also missing, including a Mississippi man whose abductors have threatened to kill him. Halliburton refuses to say if the six others were US citizens or from a third country. Earlier today, eight employees of a Russian energy company are released unharmed after being seized by masked gunmen who broke into their house in Baghdad. They spent less than a day in captivity. The Italian foreign ministry said its civilians worked for the US-based DTS Security company and were first reported missing Monday. The Italian news agency AGI and other reports said the four were taken hostage in Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad. At DTS Security in northern Virginia, operations director Jim Villegas says merely, "We have no personnel in Iraq." Al-Jazeera broadcast a video showing four Italians sitting on the floor holding their passports. Behind them were men with machine guns. The kidnappers demand the Italian government, and specifically Premier Silvio Berlusconi, issue an apology for Italy's insult to Islam and Muslims, Al-Jazeera reports. They also want Italy, which has 3,000 troops in Iraq, to withdraw according to a specific timetable.
European Affairs Minister Rocco Buttiglione says there would be no negotiations with "terrorists," although he adds that Italy will do "everything possible to guarantee the safety of the kidnapped Italian citizens." Italy has been a strong supporter of the war in Iraq. It did not send combat troops, but a contingent based in the southern town of Nasiriyah is helping with reconstruction. The abduction of the five Ukrainians and three Russians at their residence Monday appeared to be a new tactic by kidnappers. All the past seizures have come on the roads, with civilians whisked away after their vehicles come under attack. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko says no one had claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and no demands were known to have been made prior to the release. The men work for an energy company restoring a power plant near Baghdad. The Foreign Ministry said the captives had returned to their residence in Baghdad and none was hurt. Ukraine has 1,600 troops helping keep security in southern Iraq. Russia has none and opposed the war. "Abductions of foreign citizens in Iraq have resulted from a sharp escalation of tensions in the country, for the security of which the coalition authorities are now responsible," says Yakovenko. The U.S. military said two American soldiers and seven employees of U.S. contractor Kellogg, Brown & Root were missing after their convoy was ambushed Friday near Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad. Only one, Thomas Hamill, a truck driver from Macon, Mississippi, is known to have been abducted. His captors have threatened to kill and mutilate him unless US troops ended their assault on the city of Fallujah. The deadline passed Sunday with no word on his fate. The Defense Department identifies the two missing soldiers as Sergeant Elmer Krause of North Carolina and Private Keith Maupin of Batavia, Ohio. Seven Chinese men abducted in Fallujah on Sunday were freed a day later in good health and good spirits, Beijing says. A brief Foreign Ministry statement from Beijing said the men were released to an Iraqi religious group, which passed them on to diplomats. China hasn't contributed troops in Iraq and it is unclear why the seven were there. The official Xinhua News Agency described them as villagers who went to the Middle East on their own from a region with a tradition of sending migrants abroad.
In Tokyo, optimism is fading that three Japanese civilians abducted last week would be released quickly after a top government spokesman suggested authorities were no longer confident of their safety. The two aid workers and a photojournalist were being held by a previously unknown group calling itself the "Mujahedeen Brigades," which demanded the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Iraq or it would kill the captives in three days. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has refused to consider such a move, and the deadline passed with no word on the fate of the hostages. A member of the US-appointed Governing Council said on April 12 that at least 12 foreign hostages have been released. Mohsen Abdul-Hamid did not identify their nationalities or say where they were. A member of his office reached later said the number of those released was unclear. Earlier, Islamic Clerics Committee spokesman Muthanna Harith said insurgents had released nine hostages of various nationalities, including Turks and Pakistanis. It was not clear if he and Abdul-Hamid were referring to the same hostages, or if the Chinese were included. The nine were truck drivers for military supply convoys, which have come under heavy attack in recent days by gunmen on the western and southern outskirts of Baghdad. (AP/Miami Herald)
April 13: In a rare press conference, President Bush tells the media that terrorism is bad and democracy is good, and Iraq is steadily moving towards democracy. His rehearsed statement goes well enough, but his answers to journalists' questions are described by the New York Times as "rambling and unfocused," and contain little more than set pieces about the evils of terrorism and a list of dates of "good things" scheduled to be occurring in Iraq. He is asked three separate times whether he accepts responsibility for failing to act on warnings before September 11, and his most illuminating reply is (to a rephrased question asking if he has ever made any mistakes after 9/11), "[W]ish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. ...I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet. I just haven't -- you just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not quick -- as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one." He also continues to state that the August 6, 2001 briefing contained no "actionable intelligence," even though it specifically warned of imminent al-Qaeda attacks and cited the World Trade Center and government buildings in Washington as targets. (It is now known that Bush never reads his Presidential Daily Briefings, but relies on oral summaries provided by CIA director Tenet. In contrast, Bill Clinton read all of his PDBs, insisting that his aides leave him alone until he had completed reading them for himself, and save their interpretations for meetings.) The next day, the New York Times reports that administration officials say of Bush's failure to remember any mistakes he has made, "the president had anticipated that line of inquiry at the news conference. One advisor said that the White House had examined polling and focus group studies in determining that it would be a mistake for Mr. Bush to appear to yield." This after Bush says in the conference, "If I tried to fine-tune my messages based upon polls, I think I'd be pretty disappointed. I know I would be disappointed in myself."
Other lapses include his statement that Donald Rumsfeld is the Secretary of State, and his statement that before 9/11 "we assumed oceans would protect us" (that idea went out with the advent of Russian ICBMs in the 1950s). He also asserts that he would have declared war on Iraq regardless of whether or not Iraq had had WMDs, and refused to comment on why he insisted on testifying to the 9/11 commission along with Vice President Cheney. He also continues to underestimate the resistance the US is facing in Iraq, calling the mass uprisings "a power grab by extremist and ruthless elements," and saying, "It is not a civil war. It is not a popular uprising." He even asserts, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, "Most of Iraq is relatively stable." Bush lumps the Iraqi insurgents together with the al-Qaeda terrorists of 9/11, saying they are all "enemies of civilization," and share "a fanatical political ideology," statements that are patently untrue. The Progressive's Matthew Rothschild writes, "He also seems to have a static view of who the enemy is. He sees it as a finite group of innate murderers and evildoers. He thinks that all he needs to do is kill all the bad guys and victory is his. But he doesn't understand that his policy is creating new enemies by the thousands every single day. He warned that if the United States does not take 'resolute action' and does not 'stay the course' in Iraq, it will 'recruit a new generation of killers.' What he failed to grasp is that by maintaining the brutal occupation, he himself is recruiting that generation."
Former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal writes, "[Clinton] extensively marked up his PDBs, demanding action on this or that, which is almost certainly the likely reason the Bush administration withheld his memoranda from the 9/11 commission. 'I know he doesn't read,' one former Bush national security council staffer told me. Several other former NSC staffers corroborated this. It seems highly unlikely that he read the national intelligence estimate on WMD before the Iraq war that consigned contrary evidence and caveats that undermined the case to footnotes and fine print. Nor is there any evidence that he read the state department's 17-volume report, The Future of Iraq, warning of nearly all the postwar pitfalls, that was shelved by the neocons in the Pentagon and Vice-President Cheney's office. Nor was Bush aware of similar warnings urgently being sounded by the military's top strategic analysts. One monograph, 'Reconstructing Iraq,' by the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, predicted in detail 'possible severe security difficulties' and conflicts among Iraqis that US forces 'can barely comprehend.' I have learned that it was suppressed by the Pentagon neocons, and only released to US central command after Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the foreign relations committee, directly intervened.")
Bush remains unclear about who exactly will take over Iraq's government after the June 30 handover of power, and says repeatedly that the United Nations, not the United States, is responsible for handling that chore. The Times observes, "In Mr. Bush's mind, whatever happens next now appears to be the responsibility of the United Nations. That must have come as a surprise to the U.N. negotiators and their bosses, who have not agreed to accept that responsibility and do not believe that they have been given the authority to make those decisions." Bush continues to reject the idea that anyone in his adminstration has made any mistakes whatsoever, and that simply "staying the course" is the only option open to true Americans. The same rigidity of thought seems to inform his responses to new allegations and questions arising from the findings of the 9/11 commission: for Bush, it is inconceivable that anyone can question any of his or his administration's actions before, during, or after the attacks. The Times concludes, "The United States has experienced so many crises since Mr. Bush took office that it sometimes feels as if the nation has embarked on one very long and painful learning curve in which every accepted truism becomes a doubt, every expectation a question mark. Only Mr. Bush somehow seems to have avoided any doubt, any change."
One of the more interesting moments of the conference comes when Bush flagrantly contradicts himself on the question of whether or not the US could have been prepared to deal with hijackers bent on attacking the US: "[T]here was nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government that could envision flying airplanes into buildings," he says. Minutes later, Bush says that he requested intelligence briefings during the summer of 2001 because of "the Genoa G-8 conference I was going to attend" later that summer. Bush was referring to the fact that, prior to that conference, he was warned that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill him and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the summit" meetings. His statement that "the prior government" had not taken precautions against terrorists using planes as weapons is also contradicted by the facts. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that under President Clinton, "the federal government had on several earlier occasions taken elaborate, secret measures to protect special events from just such an attack" after receiving intelligence warnings. Bush also claims to have no "inkling whatsoever" about an attack before 9/11. But the Washington Post reports that newly-declassified information shows that the president did not just receive one intelligence briefing about an imminent al-Qaeda attack, but "a stream" of repeated warnings. In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community titled some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real." The CIA explicitly told the Administration that upcoming attacks would "occur on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil." None of this is discussed by Bush.
Bush concludes by making the sweeping, near-apocalyptic statement, "I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom." As we know from other sources, Bush views the Iraq occupation, and the war on terrorism, as part of a global struggle of Christianity versus evil, with the Muslims in this case doing Satan's work. It is a truly frightening viewpoint, and one guaranteed to breed further resistance in Iraq and among Muslims all over the world. Two mothers of Iraqi soldiers who watched the conference are less than impressed. "Mr. Bush made it very well known how he feels, that what the people feel does not mean a thing to him," says Sue Niederer. "He didn't answer any of the direct questions given to him. He was inarticulate, self-righteous and totally unapologetic to the American people and the families of the deceased." Michelle McHugh agrees: "I saw a man fighting for his political life, evading questions. I didn't feel much of what he said made any sense." (New York Times, White House/Los Angeles Times/Wall Street Journal/CBS/Washington Post/Daily Misleader, Guardian, Progressive, Trenton Times/Veterans for Peace, New York Times/Al Franken)
April 13: The United States and France have intimidated Caribbean countries into delaying an official request for a probe into the circumstances under which Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted from power in February, diplomatic sources reveal. The two veto-wielding permanent members of the 15-nation Security Council have signaled to Caribbean nations that they do not want a UN probe of Aristide's ouster. Any attempts to bring the issue or even introduce a resolution before the Security Council will either be blocked or vetoed by both countries, say council sources. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has been caught in the middle of the dispute, says he is unable to act unless he has a formal request to do so either by the Security Council or the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM), of which Haiti is a member. "We have read news reports that CARICOM wants a UN investigation," says UN spokesman Farhan Haq. "But unless we receive an official request either from CARICOM or from the Security Council, we cannot act on it." Aristide left Haiti in the midst of a violent uprising Feb. 29. Now in Jamaica, the country's first democratically elected leader maintains he was forced to resign under pressure from Washington, with strong backing from France. Both countries have dismissed the charge. "I don't think any purpose would be served by an inquiry," says US Secretary of State Colin Powell during a 24-hour visit to Haiti last week. "We were on the verge of a bloodbath and President Aristide found himself in great danger." At its summit meeting Mar. 27, CARICOM heads of government "reiterated their call for an investigation under the auspices of the United Nations." But despite that announcement, the group has been dragging its feet over a formal request for a probe. "The reasons are obvious," says a Caribbean diplomat. "We are under tremendous pressure not to follow up on our request."
In a statement issued last month, CARICOM said, "In the light of contradictory reports still in circulation concerning the departure of President Aristide from office, heads of government [of CARICOM] believed that it is in the compelling interest of the international community that the preceding events and all the circumstances surrounding the transfer of power from a constitutionally elected head of state, be fully investigated." One constitutional expert who closely monitors the United Nations says it is obvious where the blame lies. "It is clear that the United States and France violated the UN charter as well as the 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons, with respect to their criminal treatment of President Aristide," says Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. Boyle says that Aristide still remains the lawful president of Haiti, a member state of the United Nations. He says Annan should have publicly taken that position, and the Security Council should have demanded Aristide's immediate return to Haiti. "The fact that they did not demonstrates the continuing and further degradation of the Office of the Secretary-General, the UN Secretariat and the Security Council under this current regime of US hegemony," says Boyle. Just days prior to Aristide's flight from Haiti the Security Council denied his request for military intervention to quell the uprising, but it authorized an international military force just hours after he left the country. Boyle said it is important for CARICOM to take the matter to the 191-member U.N. General Assembly, "in order to uphold the integrity of the UN Charter, which Annan and the Security Council have repeatedly failed and refused to do."
Boyle also urged the Caribbean nations and other states to sue both the United States and France for violating the 1973 Convention before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, "in order to have the World Court as well condemn what these two malefacting states have done to Haiti and President Aristide, and to secure his return to Haiti by means of an ICJ order. The alternative is even more international chaos and anarchy, and a continuing gradual descent into world war -- like what happened to the League of Nations in the 1930s." Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a special adviser to Annan, has called on the United Nations to restore Aristide to power. To trained observers, he said last month, the events surrounding the ouster of Aristide "have the hallmarks of a US-led operation against Mr. Aristide, similar to the 1991 coup against him during the administration of George H.W. Bush, in which the US government fingerprints abounded (including thugs who subsequently acknowledged being on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency)." The situation in Haiti clearly shows it is the Security Council, not the United Nations, which is really ineffective, Joan Russow of the Global Compliance Research Project says. "The Security Council has continued to violate the principle of sovereign equality in the UN Charter. The Council has been discredited primarily because of the use of the veto by the United States and specifically by the US practice of intimidating, cajoling and offering check-book diplomacy." In the case of Haiti, she said, the General Assembly should request the International Court of Justice in The Hague to examine the US intervention. (New York Times/CommonDreams)
April 13: As British PM Tony Blair prepares to fly to Washington for talks with Bush, a host of current and former government officials are assaulting the US's military tactics in Iraq. Douglas Hurd, foreign secretary for both Thatcher and John Major, says, "You really don't win hearts and minds by filling hospitals and mortuaries," and says that the US must turn over power to those with real influence in Iraq, not just a group that "curried favor" with the Pentagon. Robin Cook, who resigned from Blair's government when it went to war, writes that American policy in Iraq amounted to "ham-fisted overkill." He says, "If the White House had wanted to help the terrorists find more recruits and funds they could not have hit upon a better way to do it." This coincides with British military criticism of US tactics, with one British ground commander comparing the US's view of Iraqi citizens to the Nazi's view of many Europeans as subhumans. (Village Voice)
April 13: Vice President Dick Cheney received $178,437 in deferred pay last year from Halliburton, the Texas oil-field services company he once headed that has received billion-dollar government contracts in Iraq. The White House releases the 2003 income tax returns for both Cheney and his wife, Lynne, and President Bush and his wife, Laura, showing Cheney's income. Cheney's office says the income from Halliburton, which almost matches his salary as vice president, was in no way linked to the financial health of the company. A Halliburton subsidiary is under investigation for possibly overcharging the US military for fuel supplies in Iraq. The deferred pay is based on a 1998 agreement in which Cheney elected to defer compensation earned in 1999 for his services as chief executive officer of Halliburton. This amount is to be paid in annual installments, with interest, over the five years after Cheney's retirement from Halliburton. Democratic senator Frank Lautenberg says that it is wrong for Cheney to "still [receive] paychecks from Halliburton. ...That's wrong. Dick Cheney is being paid almost the same amount by Halliburton as he is making as vice president of the United States." Lautenberg notes that other top officials, such as Treasury Secretary John Snow, ended their deferred compensation plans upon taking office. "Vice President Cheney should have done the same," he says. Cheney and Halliburton describe the deal as "final and unalterable." (Boston Globe)
April 13: Investigative reporter David Corn writes about the hypocrisy of the Bush administration's claim of "principle" in resisting for two years the public testimony of Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 commission and its continuing resistance to divulging the information presented by various energy corporations to Cheney's energy task force. He writes, "For months, the White House would not let national security adviser Condoleezza Rice publicly testify before the 9/11 commission. It argued that if a national security adviser could be grilled in public under oath about what she told the chief executive, then future national security advisers and other presidential aides, fearful of being hauled before Congress, might think twice before speaking candidly with the boss. There were strong counterarguments to the White House's position: the 9/11 commission is not a congressional body; 9/11 was an extraordinary event; presidential advisers have testified before Congress a few times in the past and the Republic survived. But the White House declared over and over, we are sticking to principle, this is a crucial principle, we will never abandon this principle. Then, when the political tide seemed to turn against the administration, it said 'never mind.' So much for the moral high ground. The Rice imbroglio was reminiscent of the fuss over Vice President Cheney?s energy task force. In refusing to make public the names of industry lobbyists and others with whom the task force met while crafting an energy plan, the White House maintained that this secrecy was necessary; otherwise, other outsiders might be reluctant to provide their views to presidents and vice presidents. This makes little sense. Will industry executives years from now turn down the chance to bend a president's ear because their names might appear in the newspapers? And shouldn?t the White House -- and the public -- generally be wary of advice that only arrives in a brown paper bag? But unlike the recent Rice affair, this controversy has not ended with the White House caving. The administration has fought all the way to the Supreme Court a lawsuit demanding the names of Cheney's pals. Confused about the administration's on-and-off relationship with principle? The line seems clear: the Bush White House will take the heat and defend principle for business interests, but not for national security." (TomPaine)
April 13: John Kerry writes a column for the Washington Post outlining his plans for Iraq if he becomes president. His plans are simple: formulate a plan for a transition for Iraqi self-rule that will work, and, along with United Nations assistance, make it work. He says, "Over the past year the Bush administration has advanced several plans for a transition to democratic rule in Iraq. Each of those plans, after proving to be unworkable, was abandoned. The administration has set a date (June 30) for returning authority to an Iraqi entity to run the country, but there is no agreement with the Iraqis on how it will be constituted to make it representative enough to have popular legitimacy. Because of the way the White House has run the war, we are left with the United States bearing most of the costs and risks associated with every aspect of the Iraqi transition. We have lost lives, time, momentum and credibility. And we are seeing increasing numbers of Iraqis lashing out at the United States to express their frustration over what the Bush administration has and hasn't done." The latest Bush "plan" is to throw the entire problem into the lap of UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. Kerry advocates throwing the entire weight of US support behind Brahimi, bringing the UN in as a full partner in the Iraqi transition, and, until peace can be achieved in Iraq, bringing in more troops if needed to make sure that US soldiers currently in Iraq have the support they need to achieve their mission. He advocates bringing NATO into the picture to create a NATO-comprised, US-led force to help stabilize Iraq.
Kerry notes, "The events of the past week will make foreign governments extremely reluctant to put their citizens at risk. That is why international acceptance of responsibility for stabilizing Iraq must be matched by international authority for managing the remainder of the Iraqi transition. The United Nations, not the United States, should be the primary civilian partner in working with Iraqi leaders to hold elections, restore government services, rebuild the economy, and re-create a sense of hope and optimism among the Iraqi people. The primary responsibility for security must remain with the US military, preferably helped by NATO until we have an Iraqi security force fully prepared to take responsibility." And, Kerry says, "[W]e must level with our citizens. Increasingly, the American people are confused about our goals in Iraq, particularly why we are going it almost alone. The president must rally the country around a clear and credible goal. The challenges are significant and the costs are high. But the stakes are too great to lose the support of the American people." Kerry concludes, "This morning, as we sit down to read newspapers in the comfort of our homes or offices, we have an obligation to think of our fighting men and women in Iraq who awake each morning to a shooting gallery in which it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish friend from foe, and the death of every innocent creates more enemies. We owe it to our soldiers and Marines to use absolutely every tool we can muster to help them succeed in their mission without exposing them to unnecessary risk. That is not a partisan proposal. It is a matter of national honor and trust." (Washington Post, Washington Post)
April 13: In an op-ed for the Chicago Sun-Times, Democrat Jesse Jackson says that the excuses trotted out by the Bush administration over 9/11 won't work on Iraq. He writes, "The Iraq war was his choice, his strategy, and his occupation. Before Sept. 11, he may have been lax, guilty of acts of omission. But on Iraq, his mistakes have been acts of commission for which he cannot deny responsibility. The majority of the Sept. 11 inquiry commissioners, Republican and Democrat alike, appear to believe that the horrors of Sept. 11 could have and should have been prevented. The warnings were clear, the evidence was available -- but the government didn't react. The Bush administration was focused elsewhere -- on missile defense, on China, on not being Bill Clinton. As the president told Bob Woodward, there was 'no sense of urgency' at the top, and therefore none through the bureaucracy. However, Americans aren't likely to hold the president responsible for not stopping what seemed like a bolt from the blue.
"The war in Iraq is a different story altogether. This is a war the White House chose. The ideologues in the administration -- led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- lobbied hard for it. The president rushed us into the war over the objections of the counterterrorism professionals, who correctly saw Iraq as a distraction from the war on terror that could make things much worse. He overruled the strong doubts of the professionals in the military who thought it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Iraq. The president dismissed the doubts of the diplomatic corps. And he ignored the opposition of his allies and scorned the cautions of the United Nations. He chose to put American troops on the ground essentially alone, without allies to share the burden. He ruled the UN would have no role after we took Baghdad and put his own team in charge of the occupation. He ignored military warnings that the troops were too few to provide security, and too many to sustain for more than a year. He signed off on using the National Guard and the reserves in a cavalier fashion, extending their tours repeatedly at the last moment. He and his vice president assumed that we'd be greeted as 'liberators,' so that our troops didn't really need body armor or training in nation building. The president's team ignored the State Department's detailed planning for the occupation. They chose to disband the Iraqi military, throwing tens of thousands of armed soldiers into the streets and unemployment. They put together the preposterous provisional coalition, stacked with exiles who had no legitimacy in Iraq. They fanned the fears of both the minority Sunnis who had dominated under Saddam Hussein and the majority Shiites who had been persecuted by him. They hid the costs from Congress and the American people. Even the president's current budget does not include the $50 billion to $75 billion more that he will need for Iraq this year.
"Now the liberation has turned to occupation, and the occupation has met with revolt. What is truly stunning, however, is that the administration has managed to do what most thought impossible: turn Sunni and Shiite factions that despise each other into allies. Here, the fact that the president skipped out of Vietnam and ducked out of his commitment to the National Guard probably contributed to the fiasco. He scorned the pros as weak-willed bureaucrats rather than warriors. But neither Bush nor Cheney nor Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz ever served in combat. Now reality is proving the professionals right and Bush and his ideologues terribly, dangerously, ruinously wrong. Hopefully, the UN and the allies will help bail us out. But it is already too late -- too late for hundreds of brave young men and women in the US military. And too late to keep the war from generating hatred for America and recruits for terror from across the Islamic world. We will all pay the price for Bush's mess." (Chicago Sun-Times)
April 13: Economist Paul Krugman says that if Bush and his officials truly believe that the widespread insurgency in Iraq is the work of a "small faction" of thugs and foreign terrorists, then he and his officials are "more divorced from reality than ever." Everyone but Bush and his circle of cronies, and of course his sycophants in the media, understands the situation in Iraq to one degree or another. But none of this seems to penetrate the Bush world view. For example, the Bush administration is still backing Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi for a senior leadership role, even though it is clear Chalabi has no public support whatsoever and it has become increasingly clear that Chalabi is a con artist with zero reliability. But, Chalabi and his private army were escorted into Baghdad on the heels of the invading Marines in March 2003, was given control of Hussein's secret files -— "a fine tool for blackmail," observes Krugman -- and are letting Chalabi influence the allocation of reconstruction contracts, a major source of kickbacks. Another instance is the rise of Shi'ite insurgents, in particular Moqtada al-Sadr's so-called "Mahdi Army." Like the calamitous looting of Baghdad a year ago, this seemed to be something that could have been predicted, planned for, and avoided, but was not. According to the Washington Post: "One U.S. official said there was not even a fully developed backup plan for military action in case Sadr opted to react violently. The official noted that when the decision [to close Sadr's newspaper] was made, there were very few U.S. troops in Sadr's strongholds south of Baghdad." Krugman says, "If we're lucky, the Sadrist uprising will eventually fade out, just as the postwar looting did; but the occupation's dwindling credibility has taken another huge blow." Meanwhile, Bush continues to strut around like a movie cowboy, talking tough and pretending to stand tall while around him the situation crumbles into chaos. Krugman observes that Bush insists on making a single villain the focus of all of our efforts, and that if that one particular "bad guy" is caught, the entire situation will magically change for the better.
Krugman writes, "Again and again, administration officials have insisted that some particular evildoer is causing all our problems. Last July they confidently predicted an end to the insurgency after Saddam's sons were killed. In December, they predicted an end to the insurgency after capturing Saddam himself. Six weeks ago -— was it only six weeks? -— al-Qaeda was orchestrating the insurgency, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the root of all evil. The obvious point that we're facing widespread religious and nationalist resentment in Iraq, which is exploited but not caused by the bad guy du jour, never seems to sink in. The situation in Fallujah seems to have been greatly exacerbated by tough-guy posturing and wishful thinking. According to the Jerusalem Post, after the murder and mutilation of American contractors, Mr. Bush told officials that 'I want heads to roll.' Didn't someone warn him of the likely consequences of attempting to carry out a manhunt in a hostile, densely populated urban area? And now we have a new villain. Yesterday Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez declared that 'the mission of the U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moktada al-Sadr.' If and when they do, we'll hear once again that we've turned the corner. Does anyone believe it? When will we learn that we're not going to end the mess in Iraq by getting bad guys? There are always new bad guys to take their place. And let's can the rhetoric about staying the course. In fact, we desperately need a change in course." Krugman concludes, "The best we can realistically hope for now is to turn power over to relatively moderate Iraqis with a real base of popular support. Yes, that mainly means Islamic clerics. The architects of the war will complain bitterly, and claim that we could have achieved far more. But they've been wrong about everything so far -- and if we keep following their advice, Iraq really will turn into another Vietnam." (New York Times/CommonDreams)
April 13: The wife of an American serviceman writes a scathing "thank-you" letter directed towards Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. It reads in part, "I'd like to extend a hearty thank you to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the pending 120-day extension of our troops in Iraq. After all, what's 120 days, really? For our family, it's four birthdays (again), Mother's Day and Father's Day (again), our wedding anniversary (again), and the Fourth of July, which is what service is all about for a lot of military families. I thank Secretary Rumsfeld for all of his talk about not overburdening families and soldiers. One year of their lives on the line, worrying daily about their safety, couldn't possibly be enough to 'overburden' us. Thanks from our children, who apparently don't need a father present, who cry when Mommy's time is not enough for the four of them, who were counting the days until Daddy could hold them on his lap. Thanks for betraying our trust by telling us one year 'boots on the ground' and changing it at your discretion. Thanks for making the small percentage who agree with this sound like the majority. Thanks for not sending help in the form of more troops last spring when soldiers were dying, but keeping our soldiers there for extra time this spring. Thanks for the lies you spew about how things are not so bad and we don't need more troops, all the while keeping 1st Armored Division troops there. You're obviously saying one thing and doing another. Thanks for using the excuse of these troops' experience to do so. When they kept control last year, they went in with the same experience as the new units have now. Thanks for not bothering to come to Germany, face the family members, answer our questions and put faces with your numbers. The next thank you should come from President Bush this November, when John Kerry is elected president because of the lies Secretary Rumsfeld told. The final thanks will be from whoever has to rebuild our Army's strength when my husband and many others refuse to re-enlist. I support our troops. I love my husband. We should not have to choose the Army or family. We should be able to trust that we can have Army and family."
Another letter from another spouse reads in part, "As a family member, an American, and a spouse of a currently deployed soldier with the 1st Armored Division, I have never supported this mission. I have always supported our troops. I have always supported the Afghanistan mission, which seems to have taken a distant backseat at the moment. The Iraq mission was a farce from the beginning, created by a right wing, egocentric group called the Bush administration. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney have been dreaming for decades of a pre-emptive strike. That's their philosophy. The problem I see with taking pre-emptive measures is that if your intelligence isn't rock solid, you run the risk of striking the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. Unfortunately, America 'elected' the perfect puppet for them to carry out their dream. They abused Americans' renewed trust in our government by using the backdrop of the Sept. 11, 2001, tragedies. I'll never accept any reason for the Bush administration's decision to snow Congress and the American public with their inaccurate information regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. That was an incredibly cruel thing to do to all of us. I remember how terrified we all were when our troops were sent in there with their gas masks. I say shame on our present administration. If this mission fails, let it be a lesson to our country and to the world that we've all heard before -- pride comes before a fall. Our way of life is not the right way everywhere simply because we believe it should be. We have seen countless examples where this belief has failed throughout history. In fact, our government can be blamed for several of these examples. The current administration has allowed far too many troops to be injured and killed already because of their lies and disinformation, and for that they should pay dearly. ...We had absolutely no business going to Iraq when we did. It appears to me that we haven't the slightest idea how to get out now, and that's not the fault of our hard-working, overextended troops. I know where the blame lays, and they've cried 'wolf!' too many times now for me to believe a thing they say."
A third spouse writes, "After a year of nervous waiting and living without my husband, we've been looking forward to April 2004 with great anticipation. He left for Iraq on April 29, 2003. We were told he could be gone for 365 days. The welcome home parties have all been planned, and some of the troops from the unit are already back in Germany. I am four months pregnant, a gift my husband left for us when he was on rest and recuperation leave in December. Now I've been told at the last minute that the day I've been looking forward to for a year was just a tease. This is the kind of reward the Army is giving its soldiers and family members. They have ripped our hearts out. We have given up a year of our lives and were expecting to be with our loved ones this month. Instead, they slap us in the face and tell us it will be up to another 120 days, which they think sounds better than four more months. These soldiers have lived in substandard living conditions, put their lives on the line every day and been separated from their families for a year now. It's time to return them home. They have replacements in Iraq. They're very tired and worn out, mentally and physically. They need to come home. Morale is at an all-time low. Imagine being separated from one's family for a year and living under great stress. Then a week before returning, on the way home, you're told that you'll be staying for another four months. That's a total of 16 months away, working under very high stress levels every day of that 16 months, except for two weeks of rest and recuperation. This is irrational to ask of anyone, let alone the men and women who serve this country. The children who were expecting their fathers home are now crying and wondering where they are. The wives, husbands, sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers were all expecting them home. The soldiers were expecting to come home. Let them come home." (Stars and Stripes)
April 13: Law professor Paul Campos warns that it is unrealistic to believe that the transfer of power on June 30 will have a significant impact on Iraq. He writes that the oft-repeated statement, "The United States will transfer sovereignty of Iraq to the Iraqi interim government on June 30" makes some unwarranted assumptions: "that the nation of Iraq exists, that it has an interim government, and that America is currently exercising sovereignty over this nation." All of these assumptions are fundamentally wrong. Campos writes of Iraq's dubious sovereignty: "In truth the nation of Iraq has never existed, at least not in the same sense that the United States or France or Japan exist. Modern Iraq is an arbitrary jumble of peoples, created by British imperial mapmakers, who got out of the area when the getting was good. Saddam Hussein ruled over this imaginary nation-state with brutality and sadism, in part because he is a brutal sadist, but also because the various peoples of an imaginary nation -- Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds -- would never agree voluntarily to be under the same government." Of the so-called "interim government," Campos argues that there is truly nothing of the sort. He observes, "Political legitimacy requires both a willingness on the part of the governed to recognize those who govern as their legitimate leaders, and the ability of those who govern to use state violence (aka the law) against those who do not recognize their legitimacy."
As for American sovereignty: "The Iraqi 'interim government' possesses neither of these features. The American belief in the magical power of words like 'democracy' and 'freedom' is made possible by a sort of hysterical blindness: a failure to see that it is impossible to rule over a place like Iraq with the sort of benign paternalism the Bush administration claims motivates its constantly shifting justifications for occupying a nation that does not actually exist. Imperialism is a messy business. The president and his advisers are discovering what conquerors from the British to the Romans have always known: occupying another land requires tactics that will not win you the love of the natives. The Romans in particular knew what imperial rule requires: if their legions had encountered what the US military is currently facing in places like Fallujah, the men of those towns would have been massacred, the women would have been sold into slavery, and the head of the impudent Muqtada al-Sadr would have been paraded on a spike through the center of Baghdad. Such tactics are no longer available to the rulers of liberal democracies in this enlightened and civilized era. Having shouldered the white man's burden, the Bush administration is reduced to maintaining a tenuous military grip over a region that, according to the current plan, will be transformed into a stable democracy over the course of the next few months. That stability and democracy go together in the Middle East is a pleasant fantasy that can be maintained as long as one doesn't actually pay attention to the nature of the governments in that region. Indeed the United States has never shown the slightest interest in a democratic Middle East, as illustrated by, among other things, the cravenness of our ongoing policy toward the Saudi government, our decades of solicitude toward the shah of Iran, and our enthusiastic support of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. The fruit of all this is the current worldwide cynicism about American motives. Attempting to implement democracy at gunpoint is a paradoxical and difficult venture under the best of circumstances. When a government does so after decades of indifference to the worst sort of tyranny in the very land it is now claiming to save, that government should expect a skeptical response." (Rocky Mountain News)

Bush asks Iran for its help in quelling Iraqi violence

April 14: Iran says that the Bush administration has asked for its help in quelling violent uprisings in Iraq. Iran, led by a Shi'ite Muslim government which is struggling towards its own version of democracy, is believed to have a great deal of influence among many Iraqi Shi'ites, particularly among the followers of firebrand Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army is responsible for much of the current wave of violence. "There has been a lot of correspondence," says Iraqi foreign minister Kamal Kharazi. "Regarding Iraq, there has also been a lot of exchanges of correspondence. Naturally, there was a request for our help in improving the situation in Iraq and solving the crisis, and we are making efforts in this regard." Communications between Iran and the US, which dubbed Iran part of the Bush administration's so-called "axis of evil," are facilitated through the Swiss embassy in Tehran. Neither country is in formal contact with each other since the 1979 takeover of the Iranian government by Shi'ite forces. (Agence France-Press/Channel News Asia)
April 14: The US drops its demand for the turnover of the militants who killed four American security guards and hung their bodies from a bridge in Fallujah. US officials originally made their surrender a prime aim of its onslaught on Fallujah, which has become the largest single military operation of the war since the ouster of Saddam Hussein. "US forces concentrated on one issue; the people who mutilated the dead and the necessity of handing them over. Now they've dropped the demand for their arrests," says Mohammed Ubayd al-Kubaisi, the dean of Islamic studies at Baghdad University and the vice-president of the Association of Muslim Scholars. Al-Kubaisi is one of five men who recently traveled to Fallujah for talks with local leaders. The five are on a US-approved mission to try to negotiate a cease-fire. Kubaisi says local leaders demand an American withdrawal from all the roads into town, the restoration of basic services, including water and electricity, and the repair of the main hospital which the US Marines occupied. In return, local Iraqi police would handle security. US officials said yesterday the opening rounds of intra-Iraqi talks were only the start of a negotiating process. Dan Senor, the top US spokesman for the coalition, outlined US objectives. His language on the people who mutilated the bodies was softer than last week. He called only for their "removal." US goals, he said, were "to see an end to the bloodshed, allow Iraqi officials to get in there, get in essential supplies from the government, and obviously we want to remove from Falluja the foreign fighters, international terrorists, and those Iraqis that support them, and that could include the individuals that killed the American contractors." Imams in Falluja mosques have denounced the atrocity as alien to Islam, and George W. Bush has vowed to hunt down those responsible. There was no explanation yesterday for the change in policy, though officials may have concluded they would never catch them using current military tactics. Thalfiqar Mahdi, a member of a volunteer team of doctors which has been working in Falluja since Thursday, gives a horrific account of conditions there. "The main hospital was taken over by the Americans," he says. "Doctors and patients had to evacuate to local health clinics. Over 1,000 people were wounded since the attack began, and patients had to lie on the ground because of a shortage of beds. We were doing operations in the open. But we didn't have enough sterilizing equipment. About half the injured are women, children, and the elderly." (Guardian)
April 14: Russia offers to airlift its over 800 citizens currently in Iraq out of the country, in an apparent reaction to the kidnapping and release of eight Russians the day before. Most of the Russians are employees of two energy companies, Tekhnopromexport and Interenergoservis. Tekhnopromexport indicates it will pull its employees out, while Interenergoservis says most of its employees will stay for the moment. Several other countries are advising their citizens to leave Iraq as well. (BBC)
April 14: French journalist Alexandre Jordanov, kidnapped on April 11 by Iraqi insurgents, is released unharmed. His Russian cameraman was released the day before. (BBC)
April 14: Phillippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo says that she is considering withdrawing the small number of Filipino troops, workers, and security personnel from Iraq if violence there continues to escalate. "While the Philippine government is determined to help the Iraqi people in rebuilding their nation, the safety of our peacekeeping forces in Iraq is still our utmost concern," she says. She adds that any decision to withdraw the Filipinos "will depend on the security situation in Iraq in the days to come." About 100 reconstruction workers and 50 troops and police have been sent to assist the US occupation. Arroyo, a strong supporter of the Bush policy in Iraq, is weathering heavy political weather in her country, with large antiwar protests taking place frequently, and political opponents accusing her of being a "puppet" of the Bush administration. She is running for re-election in elections to be held in May. "For a country like the Philippines with its own set of domestic problems, maintaining Filipino troops in Iraq could hardly be seen as beneficial to our country," says antiwar organizer Renato Reyes. "It's quite obvious that the coalition forces are unwanted in Iraq. Why is the Arroyo administration hell-bent on staying there?" Panfilo Lacson, a presidential candidate and the former national police chief, is demanding the withdrawal of Filipino troops from Iraq. Arroyo's reassessment of the Philippine government's Iraq deployment is election-related, says Reyes. "she's feigning concern for our troops in Iraq," he charges. "But she's not about to turn her back on the United States because if she did, she'd send a negative message to the US. She's not about to risk losing US support at this point in the elections." (New York Times)
April 14: The White House admits that Bush made at least three factual mistakes during his press conference, while he refused to admit making any in his presidency. "The president misspoke and we just want to correct the record," explains White House spokesman Scott McClellan. Bush told reporters twice during Tuesday's prime-time news conference that 50 tons of mustard gas were discovered at a turkey farm in Libya. On the second occasion, he was responding to a reporter who asked him to identify the biggest mistake he had made since the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people and prompted the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He could not. But as he searched for an answer, he reaffirmed his decision to invade Iraq and said weapons of mass destruction may still lie hidden there. "They could still be there. They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm," said Bush, referring to Libya's voluntary disclosure of weapons in March. The next day, the White House said the accurate figure for the Libyan mustard gas was 23.6 metric tons, or 26 short tons, not 50 tons. Moreover, the substance was found at different locations across Libya, not at a turkey farm. And observers did not find mustard gas on the farm at all, but rather unfilled chemical munitions, the White House acknowledged.
Reports on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which Bush cited as justification for the March 2003 invasion, have proved to be a political mine field for the president; though he has admitted at least once that Iraq doesn't seem to have any WMDs, he has consistently pushed the issue in campaign appearances and again in the press conference. Bush agreed under pressure to set up a commission to investigate prewar weapons intelligence failures early this year, just as his 2004 reelection campaign got under way. His decision came after a Bush claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger was shown to be based on forged documents. Other assertions of weapons stashes, including some made by Iraqis intent on persuading Washington to invade their homeland to oust Saddam Hussein, were also found to be wrong. Other misstatements in Bush's conference include his assertion that he supported the creation of a Homeland Security department before the 9/11 attacks, when in fact he opposed its creation until after the attacks. He also continued to insist that Hussein's Iraq posed a direct threat to the safety of the United States, although his administration has been criticized for providing Congress with intelligence that was "deliberately warped for political purposes," according to former CIA analysts and other intelligence officials, and all evidence shows that Iraq was far too weak and unarmed to pose any such threat. (Reuters/Dublin City Collective, DNC)
April 14: Arab television news provider al-Jazeera accuses the US military of pressuring its journalists to slant its coverage more towards the US, and says the military has threatened its journalists. US soldiers have reportedly fired on al-Jazeera journalists in Fallujah, and reportedly has made the removal of al-Jazeera journalists one of the conditions of a provisional cease-fire in that besieged city. In return, American administration in Iraq accuse al-Jazeera of exaggerating the number of civilian casualties and helping to boost anti-coalition sentiment by broadcasting graphic footage of dead and wounded civilians. The US marine commander in charge of Fallujah has said the majority of the estimated 600 people killed in the four-day conflict were legitimate targets, saying, "95% of those were military age males that were killed in the fighting." However al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya have repeatedly shown pictures of women and children among the dead and injured. In a statement the TV channel says the US military was putting "unjustified pressure on the media." It continues, "Al-Jazeera rejects these accusations and considers them a threat to the right of the media to cover the reality in Iraq amid a difficult and complex situation on the ground."
Meanwhile, Western journalists also fear for their lives and their freedom to report. James Hider, a London Times reporter who is embedded with US Marines near the front line outside Fallujah, says the threat of kidnapping had become so acute that the majority of western journalists were no longer venturing beyond Baghdad. "It was very serious even before the current situation, but for the past month it has got much worse. The kidnappings and shooting are coming thick and fast. We've more or less decided not to operate outside Baghdad. A lot of pretty seasoned war correspondents have decided it's not worth the risk," says Hider. Hider, whose colleague Stephen Farrell was kidnapped and eventually released last week, says the only way he and a group of other western media personnel had made it to Falluja was on heavily armed US helicopter gunships. Francis Harris, the deputy foreign news editor at the Daily Telegraph, said the situation in Iraq could get to the stage where the paper would consider withdrawing its reporters. "It could come to that," he says. What would trigger an exodus is something bad happening to a British journalist. If that happens you'd get to a situation like Beirut in the 1980s, when everybody left except a hardened few." Hider says the journalists who were most at risk of kidnapping were those with little experience of the country or those who were on short-term visits. "A lot of people come in on short-term visits and pick up drivers and translators not knowing who they are. There have been a few kidnappings that have had the look of inside jobs. So we work with a trusted pool of drivers and translators."
In spite of the increasingly serious situation in Iraq, Hider says he believed the western press would stay even if journalists were restricted to Baghdad and the Palestine Hotel, which is being used as a base by most foreign journalists in the country. "The Palestine Hotel is pretty much unassailable. It's unlikely journalists would be driven out, it's just that then the danger is that you couldn't get the story." He said the real threat to journalists came from bands of Iraqi insurgents unconnected with the main resistance group. "The level of danger depends on who you get kidnapped by. If it's the hard core resistance, they are fairly disciplined and want journalists to come in and see what the US is doing. If you get taken by some dodgy group that's little more than a group of bandits that have decided to join up with the resistance movement or are after cash, then you are in real trouble."
The Daily Telegraph currently has its staff reporter, David Blair, and freelance stringer, Jack Fairweather, on the ground in Baghdad, but Harris says their movements were being hampered by the growing danger from kidnappers and resistance fighters outside the capital. "It has greatly limited their ability to travel outside Baghdad," Harris says. "They are being considerably more cautious than they were before this trouble began. But inevitably in order to do the job, they need to talk to people. It's never been the policy of this paper or any other British paper to have reporters go around in forests of guns to guarantee their security. ...If it becomes too dangerous you end up with journalists locked up in secure zones interviewing each other and relying on the authorities for information." Over the past week, as well as Farrell, a French journalist, two Japanese and two Czech journalists have been kidnapped along with a growing number of foreign contract workers. Hider said most experienced journalists had been using ordinary Iraqi cars and were accompanied by a trusted driver and translator when venturing around Baghdad or to other towns. But even with extra precautions such as tinted windows and disguises, Hider says travelling on the roads to key areas such as Najaf and Kut was now deemed too dangerous by most journalists. On his last drive outside of Baghdad, to Najaf, Hider says he and his colleagues had had to run the gauntlet of burning vehicles and shooting on either side of the road. "The danger has been being mistaken for a contractor. The number one rule is, don't be driven around in a big white 4x4 like the ones used by contractors, because they are basically bullet magnets." (Guardian)
April 14: Humanitarian aid worker Helen Williams gives an eyewitness account of the horrific conditions in Fallujah. She is part of an effort to get civilians out of the war-torn city, and to bring medical supplies in. She describes the highway from Baghdad to Fallujah as littered with wrecked and burning vehicles, mostly gas tankers and American military personnel carriers. She tells of hundreds of civilian vehicles and carts being brought in by Iraqis from other areas of the country loaded with food and supplies for the besieged Fallujans. Bringing in medical supplies, she is told that the city's few remaining hospitals are almost bare of supplies, with doctors forced to perform surgery on wounded civilians without anesthetic. While she is at the hospital, Williams sees a young Iraqi boy brought in; he was shot in the head by an American sniper after his family went into the street waving a white flag. His grief-stricken father accompanies him, covered in the blood of his son. An Iraqi woman, unarmed and wearing the chadoor, is brought in just afterwards, dying of a bullet wound to the chest; American snipers had picked her off in the street as well. According to area civilians, American snipers are set up around the city's hospitals, firing at hospital personnel and civilians alike. Williams's colleagues take a bullet-riddled ambulance out to bring in a pregnant woman; the ambulance weathers heavy sniper fire on the way back to the hospital, but manage to bring the woman inside. Williams writes, "The American army shoots at ambulances -- no wonder they don't sign up to the International Criminal Court." She writes of seeing boys as young as 11 carrying weapons to fight the Americans: "It was a tragedy -- how scarred by these events will this young boy be when he grows up -- if he survives? He and his family probably thought he would have as much chance surviving if he fought as if he did not -- it was a very sad sight." The dichotomy is stunning: while some American soldiers shoot at anything that moves, picking off civilians, children, anyone, other soldiers try to protect the civilians and assist them in getting out of the city. Williams leaves the besieged city in the face of warnings that heavy air strikes are about to commence. (News Wales)
April 14: The reprimand against Army Captain James (Yousef) Yee for committing adultery and downloading pornography has been overturned by General James Hill, commander of the Southern Command. Yee, formerly a chaplain at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, was originally accused of espionage and treason. After those charges were found baseless, Yee was prosecuted on much less serious charges. Hill says, "While I believe that Chaplain Yee's misconduct was wrong, I do not believe, given the extreme notoriety of his case in the news media, that further stigmatizing Chaplain Yee would serve a just and fair purpose." Yee's attorney, Eugene Fidell, calls the dismissal a "bittersweet victory." Fidell says, "It wouldn't have killed them to admit a mistake. The Army has to be big enough to admit a mistake. In that regard, today was disappointing." Yee spent 76 days in custody after the military linked him to the possible espionage ring. Last month, the Army dismissed all criminal charges, but Yee was found guilty of the non-criminal violations of adultery and downloading pornography. (AP/San Francisco Chronicle)
April 14: Middle East expert Daniel Pipes writes that historically, democracy is unlikely to find much support among the Iraqi people; rather, their focus on their religion will hold sway. Pipes writes that the US expectation was, once Hussein was overthrown, that the Iraqi people would follow the same line as the populations of Germany and Japan after World War II -- the rejection of a hated government of tyrants followed by the embrace of democracy. Pipes observes, "Those two countries had been destroyed through years of all-out carnage, leading them to acquiesce to the postwar overhaul of their societies and cultures. Iraq, in contrast, emerged almost without damage from brief hostilities, and Iraqis do not feel they must accept guidance from the occupation forces. Rather, they immediately showed a determination to shape their country's future. Second, as a predominantly Muslim people, Iraqis share in the powerful Muslim reluctance to being ruled by non-Muslims. This reluctance results from the very nature of Islam, the most public and political of religions. To live a fully Muslim life requires living in accord with the many laws of Islam, called the sharia. The sharia includes difficult-to-implement precepts pertaining to taxation, the judicial system and warfare. Its complete implementation can occur only when the ruler himself is a pious Muslim (although an impious Muslim is much preferable to a non-Muslim). For Muslims, rule by non-Muslims is an abomination, a blasphemous inversion of God's dispensation. This explains why one finds a consistently strong resistance to rule by non-Muslims through 14 centuries of Muslim history. Europeans recognized this resistance, and in their post-Crusades global expansion stayed largely away from majority-Muslim territories, knowing these would awesomely resist their control."
Pipes notes that throughout the period from 1400 to 1830, European conquerors studiously stayed out of Muslim areas such as the Middle East, sub-saharan Africa, East Asia, and Australia. "In a clear pattern of avoidance, the imperial powers (Britain, France, Holland and Russia especially) took control of faraway territories, while carefully avoiding their Muslim neighbors in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia." The notable exception is France's attempt to bring Algeria into its fold; it was never successful, and the "Algerian question" dominated French foreign policy for a generation. Pipes writes, "As European rulers conquered Muslim lands, they found they could not crush the Islamic religion, nor win the population over culturally, nor stamp out political resistance. However suppressed, some embers of resistance remained; these often sparked a flame of anti-imperialism that finally drove the Europeans out. In Algeria, for example, a successful eight-year effort, 1954-62, expelled the French colonial authority. Nor was the US-led invasion of Iraq the first Western undertaking to unburden Muslims of tyrannical rule. Already in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte appeared in Egypt with an army and declared himself a friend of Islam who had come to relieve the oppressed Egyptians of their Mamluk rulers. His successor as commander in Egypt, J.F. Menou, actually converted to Islam. But these efforts to win Egyptian goodwill failed, as Egyptians rejected the invaders' proclaimed good intentions and remained hostile to French rule. The European-run 'mandates' set up in the Middle East after World War I included similar lofty intentions and also found few Muslim takers. This history suggests that the coalition's grand aspirations for Iraq will not succeed. However constructive its intentions to build democracy, the coalition cannot win the confidence of Muslim Iraq nor win acceptance as its overlord. Even spending $18 billion in one year on economic development does not improve matters. I therefore counsel the occupying forces quickly to leave Iraqi cities and then, when feasible, to leave Iraq as a whole. They should seek out what I have been calling for since a year ago: a democratically minded Iraqi strongman, someone who will work with the coalition forces, provide decent government, and move eventually toward a more open political system. This sounds slow, dull and unsatisfactory. But at least it will work -- in contrast to the ambitious but failing current project." (Chicago Sun-Times/Free Republic)
April 14: The Bush re-election campaign is overtly using the American fear of terrorism as a re-election tactic. In January 2004, one of the campaign's senior political advisors said the campaign will be finely calibrated to include "healthy mix of optimism and the fear factor." Sheldon Wolin, an author and emeritus professor of politics at Princeton University, writes, "Fear is politically useful because it simultaneously divides and unites. It breeds suspicions among neighbors as well as a common yearning for security. Using the battle cry of a 'war on terrorism' and stubbornly insisting that Saddam Hussein possessed 'weapons of mass destruction,' the Bush administration is not about to surrender the tactical advantages of an anxious public being told repeatedly that it is trapped in a war with no end-point. ...Ideally, the accompaniment to the politics of fear is political quietism." Wolin believes that the Bush administration, and the neoconservatives that support it, are using fear to quell the natural tendency of the American electorate to question its leaders, and hope that in November, the voters will march quiescently to the polls and cast their votes for Bush out of fear for their own safety and the safety of their country. (Newsday/CommonDreams)

Back to April 2004 | On to April 2004: Week Three

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

April 2004, Week Two

Page Three

Bush asks Iran for its help in quelling Iraqi violence

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